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The New York Times
U.S.
Bush Aide Resigns
After Admitting Plagiarism
By SHERYL GAY
STOLBERG, nytimes.com on the Web, March 1, 2008
WASHINGTON — A longtime aide
to President Bush who wrote occasional guest columns for his hometown newspaper
resigned on Friday evening after admitting that he had repeatedly plagiarized
from other writers.
The White House called his actions unacceptable.
The aide, Tim Goeglein, had worked for Mr. Bush since 2001, as a liaison to
social and religious conservatives, an important component of the president’s
political base. Mr. Goeglein was influential in decisions on a range of
questions important to that constituency, including stem cell research, abortion
and faith-based initiatives.
A blogger in Mr. Goeglein’s hometown, Fort Wayne, Ind., found the plagiarism.
“This is not acceptable, and we are disappointed in Tim’s actions,” a White
House spokeswoman, Emily Lawrimore, said Friday morning, hours before Mr.
Goeglein resigned. “He is offering no excuses, and he agrees it was
wrong.”
Mr. Goeglein, 44, is little known outside Washington. He is a familiar
figure to conservatives and evangelical Christians, who knew him as a spokesman
for Gary L. Bauer, the conservative who ran for president in 2000.
When Mr. Bauer dropped out of the race, Mr. Goeglein signed on with Mr. Bush,
eventually becoming a top aide to Karl Rove, the chief political strategist.
He was the eyes and ears of the White House in the world of religious
conservatives and an emissary to that world for Mr. Rove and the president.
Mr. Goeglein was often credited with turning out the evangelical vote that
helped re-elect Mr. Bush in 2004.
With Mr. Bush traveling to his ranch in Crawford, Tex., for the weekend, the
White House issued a statement late Friday saying that the president was
disappointed and saddened for Mr. Goeglein and his family.
“He has long appreciated Tim’s service,” the statement said. “And he knows
him to be a good person who is committed to his country.”
Mr. Goeglein had been publishing guest columns on the opinion page of The
News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne for more than a decade, according to the paper’s
editor, Kerry Hubartt.
Nancy Nall, a former columnist for the paper, often used her Web site,
www.nancynall.com, to poke fun at his writings, which she called “drippy and
awful.”
Ms. Nall said she was struck by Mr. Goeglein’s most recent column, on Thursday,
which included a reference to a “notable professor of philosophy at Dartmouth,”
Eugene Rosenstock-Hussey. Curious, she searched the Internet, and found
that Mr. Goeglein had lifted major chunks of the column from an article
published 10 years ago in The Dartmouth Review.
“It is true,” Mr. Goeglein wrote in an e-mail message to another Fort Wayne
newspaper, The Journal-Gazette. “I am entirely at fault. It was wrong of
me. There are no excuses.”
He said he had apologized to the author of The Dartmouth Review article.
By day’s end, more examples of plagiarism had turned up, including a column
about John Wayne copied in part from an article in The New York Sun and passages
from a column that tracked, almost verbatim, an article by Jonathan Yardley in
The Washington Post.
A review by The News-Sentinel found that of the 38 columns Mr. Goeglein
published since 2000, 19 included plagiarized material, according to Mr. Hubartt.
He said the paper would no longer publish work by Mr. Goeglein, whom he
described as “well respected here by a lot of people.”
“There was no reason for it that I can see,” Mr. Hubartt said, noting that Mr.
Goeglein had submitted columns voluntarily and had no deadlines to meet.
“He was not under any pressure.”
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